Well-conceived—although occasionally abstruse—poems that appeal to the heart and mind in equal measure.
Cummings wrestles with despair, spiritual reflection, and family ties in this intimate poetry book.
From the very beginning, it’s fairly evident that melancholy will be a major theme in Cummings’ collection. Black thoughts seep into the early poems in lines like, “My car remains, a husk of a home / Evaporated gas and shattered glass / Dissuade me from starting anything.” In “Half a Mind,” the speaker fantasizes about designing a wedding ring for a restless bedfellow and goes on to lament the way families grow distant, relatives get older, and memories fade in “I Miss the Color.” Writing about writing also becomes a recurring theme, Cummings proclaims that poetry is “my spark, a heaven-sent passion.” But the creeping melancholy and self-esteem issues drift into his poetry again like dark storm clouds: he admits his writing feels “pointless,” and he sees his “heartfelt ink a useless puddle at the bottom of / the page.” Somehow faith and God make an appearance as well, the thoughts of which provide the speaker with some small comfort, as seen in lines like, “I grind my teeth under this burden, but do not flee / For God, dissatisfied with mere stars, made me.” Cummings does a commendable job of infusing his poems with vivid sensory details, like how “The river sloshes silently / Foaming at the mouth” or “Short-lived snowflakes scatter over brown leaves.” He boldly experiments with form in poems like “Rest in Peace,” in which each line begins with “R” (and the book’s rhyming poems are equally inventive). The poems about his mother are particularly poignant and feature some oddly affecting memories, like how she plucked a Lego man out of his milk. However, some poems, like “A Thing Such As This,” in which the poet states, “I broke it, so now it's broken / A thing such as this / Has no quick-fix” are oblique to the point that the reader feels too distanced from the overall sentiment.
Well-conceived—although occasionally abstruse—poems that appeal to the heart and mind in equal measure.Pub Date: May 1, 2025
ISBN: 9798302775801
Page Count: 53
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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